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We Are Not South African explores how national identity functions as a colonial tool of communication, control, and power. Author Rachel Lara van der Merwe examines how humans and the planet are integrally shaped by the idea of the nation and speculates on how different sociopolitical imaginaries, instead of the nation, could inform ways of being-together in the world.

Linking national identity to colonialism, the book broadens the idea of the nation to include its impact on all forms of life, human and more-than-human. Van der Merwe builds her argument on three central observations: that nations are made up of conflicting and fractured imaginaries, not unified, cohesive ones; the nation is divisive by nature, tracing back to its colonial origins; and the nation, along with the state, exploits both humans and more-than-humans. In order to build a more just and sustainable planetary society, she argues, liberation from such colonial formations is vital. In response, the book asks, How could we reimagine how we organize our societies through values of relationality and mutual care rather than rigid borders? What sociopolitical imaginaries do we need, or already possess, that might inform new configurations of community?

We Are Still in the Fort is a curated selection of about seventy poems by Muyaka bin Haji al-Ghassaniy, divided into three sections spanning the quotidian, the amorous, and the political. The first part, “‘I Swipe Their String of Fish’: Poems of Mombasan Society,” features his often satirical commentary on daily life in Mombasa. The second part, “‘Take Your Misery With You’: Poems of Love and Marriage,” focuses on his psychologically sensitive observations on the volatility of love, marriage, and illicit affairs. The last part, “‘We Are Still in the Fort’: Poems of War and State,” includes epigrammatic critiques of local political leaders and a series of anti-imperialist poems defending Mombasa’s independence against the invading Omani Empire. The volume also features contextual materials on Muyaka and the context of Swahili poetry, a translator’s note, and introductions for each of the three sections.

Words Were Bullets and Seeds examines the literary and political writings of Mozambican and Angolan Marxist intellectuals that performed crucial roles in the organizations that have come to dominate postcolonial Mozambique and Angola: Frelimo and the MPLA. Tom Stennett draws on archival materials from Portugal, Angola, Mozambique, Cape Verde, Tanzania, and the United Kingdom to reframe our understanding of Angolan and Mozambican liberation struggles through an analysis of the political poetry in Portuguese written by leading intellectuals of the movements. Stennett argues that traditional political forms—speeches, party literature, manifestos—demand a close textual analysis that is sensitive to aesthetics and the specific ways in which Angolan and Mozambican revolutionaries engaged with political idioms and theories such as Négritude, African socialism, Pan-Africanism, and Marxism. Words Were Bullets and Seeds leverages literary texts as historical sources with insights into political ideological struggles to provide a nuanced understanding of Mozambican and Angolan postcolonial debates.

Across contiguous nation-states in Eastern Africa, the geographic proximity disguises an ideological complexity. Land has meant something fundamental in the sociocultural history of each country. Those concerns, however, have manifested into varied political events, and the range of struggles over land has spawned a multiplicity of literary interventions. While Kenya and Uganda were both British colonies, Kenya's experience of settler land alienation made for a much more violent response against efforts at political independence. Uganda's relatively calm unyoking from the colonial burden, however, led to a tumultuous post-independence. Tanzania, too, like Kenya and Uganda, resisted British colonial administration—after Germany's defeat in World War 1.

In Writing on the Soil, author Ng’ang’a Wahu-Mũchiriargues that representations of land and landscape perform significant metaphorical labor in African literatures, and this argument evolves across several geographical spaces. Each chapter's analysis is grounded in a particular locale: western Kenya, colonial Tanganyika, post-independence Tanzania, Zimbabwe, Nairobi, Dar es Salaam, Anam Ka'alakol (Lake Turkana), Kampala, and Kitgum in Northern Uganda. Moreover, each section contributes to a deeper understanding of the aesthetic choices that authors make when deploying tropes revolving around land, landscape, and the environment. Mũchiri disentangles the numerous connections between geography and geopolitical space on the one hand, and ideology and cultural analysis on the other. This book embodies a multi-layered argument in the sphere of African critical scholarship, while adding to the growing field of African land rights scholarship—an approach that foregrounds the close reading of Africa’s literary canon.